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Performance Principles™
Performance Principles is an e-letter written by Eric Herrenkohl that focuses on creating the business you want by building the organization you need. This is copyrighted material. However, you can copy, reprint, or forward these newsletters in their entirety so long as any use is not for resale and the following copyright notice is included intact: Copyright © 2010, Eric Herrenkohl, Herrenkohl Consulting. All rights reserved. www.herrenkohlconsulting.com, 610-658-9790.
You Can’t Fake Passion
I just attended a fantastic event in New York City led by a number of very bright people in the publishing and promotion world. After an evening of great material, each panelist was asked to provide one final piece of advice. Matt Holt, publisher for the Business Division at Wiley, said that he looks for authors who are completely committed to their books and to making them a success. If an author does not believe passionately in the value of his or her book, why would anyone pay $20 to read what he or she has to say?
This quote reminded me of the fact that the one thing you can’t outsource, synthesize, or fake is true passion. The biographer Robert Caro states that when Lyndon Johnson was Senate Majority Leader and had a new piece of legislation he wanted to push through, he would go into his office and repeat to himself – repeatedly and out loud – all the reasons why this legislation was the right thing to do. He would literally work himself into a passionate furor, and he did this so often that his staff had a name for it. Johnson is “winding himself up” again, they would say.
Johnson did this because he knew that it was impossible to sell something without believing in it completely and passionately. Music producers will tell you that in this digital age they can synthesize almost any musical element they want except for emotion. If artists can’t or won’t sing from the heart, and if they are unable or unwilling to connect with their audience emotionally through their music, no amount of post-production work can instill heart into a song.
Performance Principle: You can’t fake passion. You have to look at your work and your product and figure out how to get some passion for what you do every day. Good work alone is not enough to grow your customer base or expand your “following.” No one can or should care more about your work than you do. If you’re not passionate about what you do, how can you expect customers or others to commit their money and attention to your products or services?
Here are some questions to consider:
- Do your customers feel your passion for what you sell, or do they sense you are just going through the motions?
- Does your team know that you have a gut-level excitement for what you are doing?
- Do you have a vision for your work that goes beyond the day-to-day tasks that you complete every day?
Often, regaining passion for our work does not require changing what we do. Rather it means shifting how we view what we do. If you are in the insurance business, you don’t just sell insurance – you help people provide for the financial security of their families. If you are in the hotel business, you don’t just rent rooms – you help others get business done. If you are in the consulting business, you don’t just sell billable hours – you help people build great businesses. This kind of perspective helps you to regain your passion by viewing your current business through a new lens.
So, get away from the daily grind of work and think big and strategically about your business. You can schedule a weekend strategy retreat with your team. When I lead these sessions for clients, I often find that people emerge re-energized about their business. Or, maybe you just need to take that vacation you have been putting off. Finally, you can schedule a trip to New York City, hang out with some great people, and find some time to think – really think – about your business. It worked for me.
Ten Years to be an Overnight Success
A client of mine sold the first of several businesses he started and pocketed about 30 million dollars at the age of 35. He received a fair amount of attention in his industry for his accomplishments and some media attention as well. It was easy for people to look at him with jealousy and see a young, overnight success who had made easy money.
The fact is, he and his partners worked for 10 long years to start and build this business. For most of that time, they worked like dogs and got very little credit or attention. He told me once that, “There are some things that I had to do to build this business that I will never, never do again.” These were not illegal or unethical things. They were incredibly demanding times of all work, not sleep, and complete risk.
Performance Principle: It takes a long time to be an overnight success. Accept the fact that there are no shortcuts.
Researchers have identified what they call the ten-year rule when it comes to becoming a world-class performer. As Fortune magazine said, “Even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule.” (“What it takes to be great,” Fortune, October 30, 2006).
If you are toiling away at an area where you don’t have any talent, no amount of time will be enough to make you a success. But if you have ability, then here are some principles to keep in mind for becoming a master of your own craft:
- Master the basics. Every craft – business, medicine, art – has its technical skills and mastering those technical skills can be tiresome. But you have to master the basics if you want to be world class.
- Cultivate relationships. Technical ability is rarely sufficient to get you to the top. Be intentionally about developing relationships and staying in touch with people throughout your career. Keep your Outlook or other contact management software up-to-date. Look for opportunities to connect and reconnect with others in and out of your field. These relationships are just as much the currency of success as are your technical abilities.
- Use compounding interest to your benefit. If you can improve your results by 10% per month, in 7 months you will be 100% better than you were when you started. Don’t be afraid to make small improvements and allow those improvements to build on one another. Before you know it you will be an expert.
- Enjoy the work itself. Many of us are motivated by the financial rewards, power, and respect that achievement brings. That’s fine when kept in perspective, but to sustain a long-term commitment to our work, we have to find some rewards in the work itself. At the end our careers and lives, the only one who is going to really care about what you accomplished at work is you.
- Get the word out. All of us are in the marketing business. It’s not enough to be good at something. You have to be able to communicate the problems that you solve through your expertise, and to build a brand for yourself and your abilities that creates credibility and draws people to you. If this smacks of self promotion, take a moment to consider how many truly talented people there are whose skills and abilities are underutilized because they could not figure out how to build a following.
- Don’t ever quit. As Ross Perot purportedly said, “Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success.”
The Downfall of My Favorite Restaurant
I went to my favorite restaurant in West Philly yesterday for lunch. I found this place a couple of years ago. The food was phenomenal and it was always packed with Penn students and faculty. Business was good enough that, this past summer, they closed down for a month and did a complete renovation. They gutted the place, redid the dining room, and brought the décor of the restaurant up to the level of the great food they served.
There is only one problem: yesterday, the food was mediocre. Some of their best dishes were missing from the menu, and the food was not up to its usual level. It was on the whole a very average dining experience. I sat in the restaurant and thought to myself: you can do whatever you want to the decorations, to the point-of-sale system, even to the staff. But the food had better be excellent. Because it was not yesterday, I am on the lookout for a new restaurant.
Performance Principle: Understanding what makes a fantastic customer experience and creating that experience every time is one of the secrets to a successful business. In the end, if you create a fundamentally strong customer experience, you can make a lot of other mistakes and still survive. Conversely, you can do all the peripheral things well, but if your customer experience is lousy, your business is in trouble. Here are some points to consider in this light:
Are you doing fundamentally high-quality work? If you are selling computer supplies, do the right products arrive at your customer and do they arrive on time? If you are selling professional services, do you create the results your customer is looking for? If you sell kitchen & bath remodeling, do your clients get the kitchen of their dreams for a price they can afford? These are the fundamental value propositions of your business. While there are things you can do above and beyond these deliverables to turbo-charge a business, you won’t be around to do them if you are not delivering on the fundamentals.
Every business rises and falls on word-of-mouth. We all want to make buying decisions based on the reference of people we trust. To the extent that your customers are singing your praises, you will maintain strong revenues and profitability. In order to guarantee this, you have to make sure that everyone in your business is committed every day to making the basic quality and delivery of your product excellent. You must ensure that the customer experience surrounding the purchase and use of your product is extraordinary.
There is nothing more important than serving customers. In some businesses, employees want to “graduate” from serving customers to doing more “professional” things like buying product, talking to vendors, or creating marketing events. Of course those things are good, but you need a business filled with people who have a passion for serving the customer. That should be the best job in your company.
Keep Your Eyes Downhill, and Your Skis Will Follow
Occasionally, I get to downhill ski. On our last trip, I finally learned how to handle the black-diamond mogul runs. When skiing one of these steep slopes in the past, I usually ended up flat on my back. If not, I was off on the edge of the slope, my skis pointed into the forest, completely sideways on the mountain. I could not figure out how to make progress down the hill.
Then it dawned on me. I was going sideways because I was looking sideways – literally. I was so worried about the moguls that I was watching them the entire time, and then inevitably skiing right into them. I realized that if I wanted to get down the hill, I had better start looking down the hill. I did, and sure enough, my skis followed.
Performance Principle: Keep your eyes fixed on where you want to be, and the rest of you will follow. Obstacles have a tendency to draw our attention. We get focused on the problems rather than the objective, and then wonder why we are not making real progress.
Questions to Consider:
- What specific challenges or obstacles keep arising for your team?
- Instead of focusing on “overcoming” the obstacle, have you defined what success looks like? What is the goal toward which you are aiming?
- How can you and your team stay focused on the success that you want rather than on the problems you want to avoid?
You Have a Beautiful Home
When my wife and I sold our home in St. Louis to move to Philadelphia, we interviewed a number of realtors. One of my standard questions to these realtors was, “What are the problems with this house? What do we need to change or neutralize in order to sell it for the maximum price?”
Most of the realtors immediately plunged into a long description of the flaws and imperfections of our home and provided detailed descriptions of what they would fix. One realtor, however, would have none of this. Her only response was, “You have a lovely home.” She absolutely refused to be critical of our house until we agreed to list our house with her. We didn’t choose her as our realtor (we chose a realtor who was referred by someone we trusted, the ultimate sales tool) However we were struck by the fact that this woman was a sales pro. She had a process that she used to persuade homeowners to list their homes with her, and one part of that process was to never provide criticism or consulting until after people signed a contract with her.
Performance Principle: Save your consulting for after the contact is signed. Don’t try to begin new business relationships by telling people all the things they are doing wrong. Instead, clarify specifically how you can help them and what this is worth in dollars and cents. And save your feedback and criticism for the client until the contract is signed.
Here are some points to remember and steps to take to improve your consultative selling process:
1. People assume you know what you are talking about. Experts of all stripes believe that they must convince people of their expertise. Prospective clients generally assume that you know what you are talking about unless you convince them otherwise. So stop giving away your expertise in a low-percentage ploy to increase your credibility.
2. Clarify objectives and value, don’t discuss methodology. Instead of spending your time describing how you will solve someone’s problem, focus on clarifying what problems you will solve and how much value this will create. The quality of your questions will go a long way to revealing your expertise without getting you bogged down in discussing technicalities which no one finds valuable.
3. Define specific key results. Clients often talk in overarching terms about their objectives. This helps you to understand the big picture from their perspective, but you have to get more specific as well. You must define specific key results that will indicate if your work together is being successful. These should be specific, measurable results that are tied to your work (our customer acquisition numbers increase by 20%; we operate 5 new programs in the first half of 2009).
4. “Dollarize” problems for clients. Translate every key result that you discuss with a client into dollars. If you are going to help a company overhaul its IT infrastructure, how much money will that make or save for your client? If you are helping a professional services firm implement a new sales tracking system, what is that worth to the client? If you can’t connect the dots between your actions and these hard dollars, you are not going to getting hired.
5. Ask people to work with you. You have to invite prospective clients to work with you. After clarifying key results and “dollarizing” problems, I say something like this: “Joe, I invite you to work with me on this, I think we can make a lot of progress together.” Short, sweet and effective.
6. After the invitation, stop talking. After inviting a prospective client to work with you, you have to stop talking – a feat many of us find difficult. Give the other person an opportunity to agree to become your client.
Until next month,
Eric
Building a Farm Team in a Down Economy
In a recent talk to Philadelphia executives, I explained how to build a “farm team” of strong potential employees. Farm team is a baseball term. Every major league baseball team has multiple minor league teams made up of players ready to be called up to the big leagues with little notice. In business, a farm team is your active list of strong performers who currently work for someone else but could be enticed to work for you if the offer is right. By taking the initiative to find and interview these people now, you build your own farm team of strong potential employees.
After the talk, a banker came up to me and said, “I am going to implement this farm team idea immediately. I get phone calls every day from job hunters, and I have been telling them that we are not hiring. Now I am going to tell them that we are not hiring right now, but I want to interview them anyway.”
Performance Principle: A bad economy is a great time to build your own farm team. In the midst of short-term pressures, take the time to interview and network. Here are some specific payoffs from building your own farm team right now:
1. Good people are available in bad times. Great performers shake loose in times like these. Now is the time to make connections with these people even if you don’t hire them immediately. Joel Spolsky in his book Smart & Gets Things Done estimates that one truly gifted computer programmer is worth at least five times as much as a competent programmer. The ratios may be slightly different in your business, but the principle holds fast across all companies and industries. If your interviewing yields just one terrific person, it is worth it.
2. Interviewing does not necessarily mean hiring. You are not making a commitment to hire anyone; you are simply meeting with them for an initial interview. The only cost to you is your time, and the investment of time is worth it.
3. Build your own network. Every person you interview today is someone that you add to your own network. If you treat people with respect and stay in touch, that relationship may well be valuable whether or not you hire the person.
4. Market intelligence. Having a regular schedule of interviews keeps you apprised of what is going on in the marketplace. Building your farm team makes you more intelligent about your marketplace and better connected within it.
5. Confidence to deal with poor performers. One of the primary reasons that managers don’t confront poor performers is that they do not have anyone to take their place. If your executives and managers have active candidates who can fill positions in their departments, they will be more willing and able to deal quickly and directly with sub-par performance.
Until next month,
Eric
